By AJ McDougall
After Jennifer Sellitti lost her partner Joe Mazraani, she thought everything was over. Then she inherited his ship
After Joe died, Jennifer Sellitti felt as though she were living underwater.
Other people became murky, their words muffled. She slept constantly; unconsciousness was a blessing. On the worst days, memories bowled her over.
“It was flashbacks, constantly,” she said. “I’d be having a conversation with you and look completely normal, but I’d really not be paying any attention because I’d be seeing these horrible images over and over again.”
Her brain replayed a grim carousel of intrusive memories from the morning of 29 July 2025. Pulling Joe out of the water, his limp body swinging from the hydraulic winch they normally used for retrieving deep-sea treasures.
Her, kneeling over Joe on the back of his boat, trying desperately to revive him. The death-mask look settling on his face as the life drained out of it. The two moles under his right eye, the ones she liked to kiss when she said goodbye.
She knuckled down, found tricks to stem the torrent. She had always been good at packing uncomfortable feelings into boxes; her job as New Jersey’s top public defender demanded it. But the problem with doing that, she knew, was the potential for those boxes to explode.
One night in early September, six weeks after his death, she stopped off at the dock to check on Joe’s boat – there had been a problem plugging into the shore power grid the day before. It was after a work event, and Jenn was in a ballgown and heels. She stepped aboard and immediately felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to her stomach.
“I don’t think I’d cried that hard since it happened,” she said. She lay down in Joe’s bunk. When she got up, somehow two hours had passed. “It was suddenly midnight and I’m on this boat, and it was like, what next?”
Read the full article on The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/sep/15/shipwreck-diver-jennifer-sellitti
